The “March on McDonald’s” Targets Inequality in Fast Food and Across Trump’s America

In Chicago today, organizers of the Women’s March are on the move again. Racial justice activists from the Movement for Black Lives and Color of Change are marching beside them. Climate activists, immigration advocates, community organizers and progressives of many stripes are filling the streets of Chicago to demand change, not only in Washington, but in tens of thousands of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. and across the world.

The broad coalition is joining the Fight for $15 in their call for the fast food giant to pay a wage of $15 an hour and recognize workers’ right to form a union free of intimidation and harassment.

As a result, activists are taking on not only Trump and his agenda but corporate allies that are making the country—and the world—more inequitable. Today the target is McDonald’s, poised to hold its annual shareholder meeting in the Chicago suburbs.

Demos research finds that fast food is one of the most unequal industries in the U.S. economy, not only because fast food employees are the lowest-paid workers (with an average hourly wage of just $9.09), but also because fast food CEOs are some of the most highly compensated workers, raking in $23.8 million in total compensation on average in 2013. At McDonald’s itself, CEO Steve Easterbrook received a 368 percent raise in base pay last year.

In other words, fast food isn’t a low-wage industry—it’s just an extraordinarily inequitable one, with poverty wages for the people contending with hot grease mirrored by stratospheric pay for those at the top. The Trump administration, which initially nominated a fast food CEO to lead the Department of Labor, has outlined policies that would push the entire country further in the direction of extreme inequality. No wonder people are marching.